Pedro Carvalho
Fairleigh Dickinson University Silberman College of Business
Kent Fairfield
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Greyston Bakery provides job opportunities to people living in Yonkers, NY, who are often excluded from the labor market because of an undesirable employment history or background. A pioneering social enterprise, the company uses an Open Hiring™ Model in its world-class commercial bakery, offering anyone who walks through the front door the chance to work. Once hired, Greyston supports employees with the necessary skills training and other resources to help them thrive and lift them out of poverty.
According to the company website, this approach is based on the philosophy that "a single individuals' ability to find and keep a job can have a profound repercussions throughout a community: inspiring hope in families, neighborhoods, and among local businesses."
Greyston Bakery is innovative in multiple ways, beginning with the fact that the company is a center for open hiring, offering employment to individuals based on their potential and not their work history or background. Anyone is given the chance to work, no questions asked. People of all faiths and sexual orientation, immigrants and refugees, the formerly incarcerated, past drug users, and others who may have been excluded from job opportunities, are all accepted.
Greyston's Open Hiring™ Model also addresses the needs of the community with programs such as child care, after-school programs, low-income housing, workforce development, and urban community gardens. Greyston Career Development Manager, Tia Parrish, told us “Greyston Bakery envisions a world where the widespread adoption of open hiring eliminates systemic barriers to employment so that everyone willing to work has a fair chance to obtain and keep a job.”
The hope is that the company's success will inspire and educate business executives, social entrepreneurs, impact investors, policy advocates, scholars, and mindfulness practitioners to duplicate its innovative business model elsewhere.
The inspiration for the company's creation dates back to the 1980's when Greyston Bakery's founder, Roshi Bernie Glassman, identified that there were many people in the local community suffering in poverty. Glassman noticed the prejudice companies had about hiring former convicts and others with troubled histories and questioned why America was not doing anything to help these citizens. He refused to allow the system to label them as another statistic and believed that employment was the key to self-sufficiency. “We don’t hire people to bake brownies, we bake brownies to hire people.”
Glassman instilled an open-door policy that welcomes everyone regardless of their work experience and social barriers, giving them the opportunity to gain a skill so that they can stand on their own two feet.
Over time a new and larger mission grew. The company's partnership with Ben & Jerry’s, to provide brownies for some of their ice cream flavors, set many other projects into motion, such as the Greyston Foundation. The company's’ commitment to personal and professional growth drives their everyday operations and helps the surrounding local community flourish.
Greyston Bakery employs 100 people. The company's programs in workforce development, housing, healthcare, early learning, and childcare help more than 5,400 people in the community annually.
Greyston's Early Learning Center (ELC) allows parents to seek employment and keep a job by providing a safe, stimulating, and nurturing educational environment for their children. The ELC coaches and supports parents as they strive to balance getting ahead in their lives with providing for their children. To accommodate the schedules of working parents, the ELC offers after school homework help and recreational programs. Since 1991, it has served over 2000 children, helping move them along the pathway to becoming healthy, secure, and responsible members of the community.
Greyston Workforce Development provides skills training, career counseling, job placement, and job retention services. Courses are designed to be responsive to the current needs of employers in the local community. Operating since 2009, Greyston Workforce Development has trained over 500 people and placed more than 300 with local companies, agencies, and organizations.
Greyston Community Gardens, a community center without walls, manages ten patches of relaxing, safe, and productive green space in a dense urban environment, helping to nurture a healthy and sustainable community. Cultivating an ethos of personal responsibility, community participation, and mutual respect, the gardens produce over 14 tons of fresh produce annually. Nearly 1,000 local citizens buy produce from the gardens.
Access to safe and affordable housing is critical for vulnerable populations working hard to get and keep jobs. In the mid-1980’s, Greyston pioneered the concept of affordable permanent housing for homeless individuals, combined with on-site tenant services. The company continues to provide low and moderate-income families with housing opportunities so they can remain in the community. Over the past 30 years, Greyston’s housing portfolio has expanded to over 200 units of permanent housing.
What started as a modest bakery, has turned into a globally recognized brand that attracts the interest of multinational corporations, demonstrating that Greyston’s unique Open Hiring™ Model and mission is compatible with a profitable business. Greyston Bakery is a supplier for Ben & Jerry's ice cream products and Whole Foods Market.
Over more than three decades of pioneering work, the company has overcome the risks and reaped the rewards associated with open hiring practices. These benefits can now be enjoyed by other businesses and include:
Greyston is recognized as a pioneer in social enterprise. The company plans to publish the first human resources handbook and proposed standards for its unique Open Hiring™ Model. Access to its commercial enterprises and programs act as a catalyst for the design, testing and piloting of businesses and social innovations around economic inclusion and social equity.
Greyston supports the local community. Many of the job and social services offered to Greyston's employees are available to family members, neighbors, and others in need. This includes childcare, housing, healthcare, and access to Greystone Workforce Development.
The company's Urban Community Garden program manages 10 patches of green space and offers environmental education through its Enviro-Earth Club. The gardens produce 14 tons of fresh produce annually.
Greystone is an excellent example for organizations, especially small businesses, to look at as a solution to help struggling communities flourish.
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Tia Parrish, Career Development Manager
